


focus on

by ssstrychnine



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, First Kiss, Fix-It, M/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 12:50:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20621315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: Only when Bev jumps does Richie start to think that maybe they really will be okay. Her hair catches the morning sun and she starts to falls and they're alive. He lets out all of his breath. He turns to Eddie, adjusts the shirt-bandage, untying it and then tying it tighter. Eddie doesn’t say anything. Bill jumps. Mike jumps. Ben jumps. Richie wipes his hand again and then holds it out and Eddie glances at it and away, like he doesn’t know what Richie’s offering, but then he makes a sound in the back of his throat, like a cough, and he takes it. Richie doesn’t look at their held hands, he looks out across the water. Their skin is so slimy and dirty and scratched that he can’t feel where he ends and Eddie begins. He thinks that Eddie’s hand is a little smaller than his. He thinks that he used to know that too.





	focus on

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tozier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tozier/gifts).

Underground, in the sewers, Eddie is stabbed through the shoulder by a twenty foot praying mantis clown demon. Richie sees this. He watches it through a haze of light, a blurry drive-in movie projection, not real because it can’t be. Eddie is stabbed and then thrown to the ground and he’s screaming Richie’s name and it can’t be real, because nothing is real but the deadlights. He blinks and the light splits and then he blinks again and he has his limbs back and his feet are on the ground. Black rock, dark and fluid, curved and spiked. He blinks again and Eddie is still calling his name. He turns toward him and starts to run and his legs give out and he falls straight away, scratching up his palms on the strange oily rock. He gets to his feet again and runs again and this time he reaches Eddie quickly. 

“Is it bad?” Eddie asks. “Am I dying?” He’s slumped against a wall and there’s a dark patch at his shoulder, under his collarbone. Richie thinks of deboning a chicken, the hollow space between the wing and the body, where it’s just skin and fat. 

“You’re not dying,” he says, his voice shaking, “you’re-” He touches Eddie’s shoulder and his hand comes away red and wet. “Oh, fuck.”

“_ Fuck _ ?” Eddie struggles to sit up, going cross-eyed trying to see where he’s been hurt. “What the fuck do you mean _ fuck _?” Richie presses his hand to the wound, pushing him back down in the same motion. Eddie yelps and then hisses, this sharp pained sound that makes Richie’s skin crawl. Behind them, the others are shouting, crossing the rock toward them, and Pennywise is writhing and curling into itself, like an insect that’s been salted.

“Just- let me-." Richie grunts, tries to tear at the hem of his over-shirt but can’t get a strong enough grip on the damp fabric. His palms are bleeding. He gives up, takes the whole shirt off, and wraps it under and around Eddie’s arm, tying it as tightly as he can. He’s pale under the dirt and grime and shit and whatever else there is in this fucking place. Asteroid dust, probably carcinogenic. Eddie would definitely think so. He keeps that to himself. The deadlights are still in his head, white heat, and his vision is cracking at the edges, strange sparking ripples that make him feel like he’s underwater. But Eddie is... Eddie is hurt and he can't-

"Richie, is he- Eddie, are you okay?" Ben asks, arriving first, Bev close behind him. She is covered in blood and Ben's hair is sticking up at all angles, full of dirt and dust.

"Richie says I'm dying," snaps Eddie, scowling at him. "I killed him-_ it _though, didn't I? Please tell me that fucker is dead."

"Can you move?" Bev asks, voice gentle. Richie can't bring himself to say anything. He watches the joint of Eddie's shoulder, under his wrapped and knotted shirt, and he waits for the blood to seep through.

"Yeah," says Eddie, and he staggers to his feet, pushing off the rock wall to lean heavily on Richie's shoulder. Richie puts an arm around his waist. He shuts his eyes briefly, feels the curve of Eddie's body under his hand, and then pushes that thought away. Behind them something is stirring, sparking like cut wire, not dead. But that'll be easy, that’ll be fucking gangbusters because Eddie's moving too. Not dead.

Later, on the cliff over the quarry, they’re hurt but they’re alive. Richie can’t think. There’s something in his head, some blinding thing, an empty closet or an arcade token or a hammock underground, and he thinks that if he looks at it directly he might stop breathing. He’s spent his whole life turned away from it. Maybe it’s just the fucking deadlights. Something put in him by the clown. Doubt and fear. Next to him, Eddie is shaking so badly his teeth are rattling. Bev and Ben are holding hands. There’s something wrong with Richie’s eyes. He’s going to have to get a new prescription, he thinks, wildly. He takes his glasses off and shoves them into the back pocket of his jeans, wipes at the blood and dirt caught in his eyelashes. 

Only when Bev jumps does Richie start to think that maybe they really will be okay. Her hair catches the morning sun and she starts to falls and they're alive. He lets out all of his breath. He turns to Eddie, adjusts the shirt-bandage, untying it and then tying it tighter. Eddie doesn’t say anything. He’s married, thinks Richie, but he doesn’t say anything either. He pats Eddie’s shoulder, pats it again, wipes his hand off on his own thigh. Eddie watches him with narrowed eyes, mouth tight. Bill jumps. Mike jumps. Ben jumps. Richie wipes his hand again and then holds it out and Eddie glances at it and away, like he doesn’t know what Richie’s offering, but then he makes a sound in the back of his throat, like a cough, and he takes it. Richie doesn’t look at their held hands, he looks out across the water. Their skin is so slimy and dirty and scratched that he can’t feel where he ends and Eddie begins. He thinks that Eddie’s hand is a little smaller than his. He thinks that he used to know that too.

“Okay, fuck it,” he says and Eddie shakes out his shoulders and starts to scream, wordless shouting, his grip almost painfully tight, and they take their run up and they jump.

They lose grip on one another in the air, in that held breath moment before they start to fall, but they find each other again in the water. 

“Try not to put your head underwater,” says Eddie, shaking water from his hair. “You could get meningitis.” He tilts his head back, mouth a stubborn line, right arm useless at his side. He’s left handed, Richie remembers. His mother used to try and train him out of it, but it never stuck. Richie remembers being grateful for that because it made it a lot easier to knock his hand carelessly (carefully) against Eddie’s when they sat next to each other in class. 

Eddie starts to kick furiously to keep himself afloat, striking out at Richie’s shin under the water.

“Are you really kicking me right now?” Richie dashes a palmful of water at him. “I saved your life, man.” 

“I saved _ your _ life, _ man _, stay the fuck away from me if you don’t wanna get kicked.” Richie doesn’t move. Eddie doesn’t kick him again. Richie fumbles for his glasses, fusses with them, the crack in the glass, the blood, rinsing it clear. He puts them back on again. Eddie is married, he thinks but doesn’t say.

“Lean on me, okay?” he says, instead, “if you get tired.” 

"I need to go to the fucking hospital, Richie, who knows what kind of demon spores were on that claw. You ever hear of valley fever?” 

Richie doesn’t say anything. He looks across the water to their friends. Everyone looks shell-shocked, pale, exhausted, but relieved too, the fear wiped from their faces. Mike floats on his back, eyes closed. Ben and Bev play at splashing and dunking each other and laughing. Bill watches them, eyes warm. They’re missing one, thinks Richie. Stan would be worrying, but he’d be smiling too. 

“Fuck,” says Richie, his throat aching. His eyes tear up and he blinks them back and his glasses fog and the tears keep coming, too many to brush away, slipping down and over his cheeks and off his chin and into the water. “_ Fuck _,” he says again. Eddie is staring at him, expression unreadable, and then he swims, clumsily, a little closer. 

"Hey just-." He touches Richie's face instead of finishing the sentence, fingers at his cheek and his thumb swiping at his tears, collecting them. He does the same on the other side, frowning, and then he pats Richie's cheek, a little too hard. "We're alive," he says. "And that fucking thing is dead."

"Yeah," says Richie. His tears have stopped and it feels like his heart has too. Eddie is married. He wants to ask him to touch him again, but he doesn't. "Except Stan isn't here."

Eddie's face breaks open at that, this crumpled hangdog expression that makes Richie want to gather him up and hold him until it's gone again. He looks down at the water instead, at the blood and dirt that is coming off his clothes in waves, and the others must sense that something is wrong because then they're there, splashing over and tangling themselves up. They crowd together, touching where they can, faces tilted to the sun. Mike is crying openly. He's had this whole town on his shoulders, all the death and rot and filth. Richie slings an arm around his shoulders and tucks his other arm around Bev's waist and she presses her face into his shoulder. Ben helps Eddie stay afloat, one arm around his waist, and Richie resists the urge to tell him that's his job, actually, and he can take over any time. He sighs and Bev sniffs and Bill ruffles Eddie's hair, and okay he's really going to have to call Bill out, because that's definitely his job too, and-

"Seriously I need to go to the hospital before I die of septic shock," says Eddie, voice shaking.

"Yeah Bill, you're killing Eds," mutters Richie, and he shoulders his way to Eddie's other side, and together they get him out of the water.

Richie practically carries Eddie to the car, which is pretty fucking difficult because he's wearing wet jeans which apparently make him about eighty pounds heavier. He complains the whole way too, about the correct way to lift a person and about how Richie should really have him over his shoulders, a fireman's carry, which is absurd because he can actually walk and isn't unconscious, he's just been stabbed a little bit. A flesh wound. He'd probably freak out completely if Richie threw him over his shoulder anyway. Richie knows he would. He keeps tight hold on his waist though, and on the hand he has draped over Richie's shoulders, and when they get to the car he tries to be as gentle as possible, helping him into the front seat. 

Hospital is easy. Eddie gets stitches and antibiotics and pain pills. A raised eyebrow at the stab wound in his cheek. More stitches. Better dressings. He demands the nurse give him back Richie’s bloody shirt, and keeps it balled up in his fist for the remainder of the visit. Everyone else is checked out for concussions and shock and bad bruising. Richie... Richie can’t explain what’s wrong with him. He’s no more battered and bruised than the others, but he’s still moving like he’s underwater. When he shuts his eyes he sees the deadlights. Not their future, not all of them dying, just the lights and a feeling at his fingertips like he’s touching something that isn’t there. A phantom. But a nurse asks him to follow a flashlight with his eyes and tells him there's nothing much wrong with him, other than exhaustion and the scrapes at his palms.

“If I told you I got hypnotised by an evil clown demon, would you believe me?” he asks her and she gives him a long flat stare and moves on.

They go back to the guest house. Everyone disappears into their own rooms, at first, because they're still disgusting from the sewers and the shitty quarry water hasn't done much to help that. Richie washes his hair three times and it still feels strange when he's toweling it dry. He dresses in sweatpants and slippers. He digs out his spare glasses from his suitcase. They're rounder, tortoiseshell, and he hates them with a passion. His manager calls him _professor_ every time he wears them, just to piss him off. He goes to Bill's room afterwards, and everyone else seems to have had the same idea. Richie understands that. He's reluctant to leave any of them, now, in case they disappear when he's not looking.

Bill has stolen a bottle of bourbon from the bar downstairs and he and Mike are on the bed, passing it between them and Ben and Bev are on the floor, engrossed in each other, and Eddie is pacing and muttering to himself, rubbing at his wounded shoulder. Richie grabs the bottle off Bill and two glasses from the bar and sits in the only armchair in the room.

"Eds?" he asks, and Eddie glances at him, distractedly, and nods when he shakes the glass in his hand. 

"Should you be drinking while you're on pain meds?" Bill asks Eddie, one eyebrow raised. 

"Absolutely not," mutters Eddie and he takes the offered glass from Richie and drains it in one go. He screws up his face and puts the glass on the coffee table. "Fucking disgusting," he mutters. "Why the fuck am I here?" 

"You called your wife yet?" Bev asks him, voice teasing. Richie freezes and then drinks to pretend he hadn't. 

"You called your husband yet?" Eddie retorts and Bev looks down and away, to Ben, who has his head on her shoulder and his eyes closed. 

"He isn't... I left him," she says, quietly. She touches her wrist, the bruises there that were there before they ever went into the sewers.

“Yeah, well.” Eddie’s mouth twists and he makes a vague gesture with one hand. “It’s... complicated... on my end too,” he says. He glances at Richie and then away and Richie wonders what the fuck _ that _ means and then, for one brief horrible moment, he wonders if maybe Eddie really did die underground and this is a shell, a trick, a corpse with bubbling skin and too many teeth. He chews on his lip, he drinks, he taps out a feverish beat on the arms of his chair. No. No, he would know if Eddie had died. He would feel it. The best parts of himself being torn out. Eddie is _ married _. 

“Hey Eds,” he says, his voice coming out raspy and strained.

“What? If you have something to say about my-” 

“No, just... what’s her name?” He very much does not want to know what her name is, but he can’t stop himself from asking. He needs a reminder of what’s not his. 

“Oh.” Eddie looks stricken. He wrings his hands. “Well, if that’s all-”

“Actually, fuck that, I need to get some shut eye.” Richie stands and he doesn’t wait for anyone to say anything or to stop him, he just stalks out of the room, hands shoved deep into his pockets, eyes on the carpet so he can’t see whatever awful terrible fucking expression Eddie is bound to have on his awful terrible fucking face. He slams the door behind him and in the corridor, he stares at the painting on the opposite wall. A fucking carousel, children with balloons, muted pastel colours. 

"This fucking town," he mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets and heading down the hall.

He doesn’t go to his room, he goes to the fire escape and sits on the stairs. It’s twilight, not full dark, and the air is cool and everything is grey-blue and quiet. He pulls at the beginning of a hangnail with his teeth and wishes he still smoked. It’s just all too much, all at once. When he’d walked into the restaurant, only a few days earlier, and seen Eddie, it had hit him so sharply he’d almost given himself lockjaw keeping back everything he wanted to say. I was in love with you and I don’t know you. He pulls at the cuticle too sharply and it starts to bleed and he sticks his finger in his mouth to stop it.

Bev finds him. She doesn’t say anything, just sits down next to him on the step and lights a cigarette. They pass it between them and Richie remembers this too. They would cross the back field at school to a big willow with drooping branches that kept them out of sight. They would lean against the trunk and pass a cigarette between them and shoot the shit. She’d been easy to talk to. He’d come close to telling her about Eddie half a hundred times. He flicks ash off the end of the cigarette, watches the smoke rise in a thin, slow curl, and passes it back to her. 

“What’s with you and Eddie?” she asks, when they’re done with the cigarette and she’s stubbed it out on the step.

“What’s with you and Ben?” Richie mutters, before realising how that sounds and groaning, burying his hands in his hair and shutting his eyes. “Ignore that.” 

“Does he know?” Bev asks, her voice soft. She tucks her hand under his arm and he opens his eyes, leans into her. 

“No one knows,” says Richie, and then he remembers something else. “Stan knew.” 

“Stan knew everything,” she says, after a pause. “You wanna talk about it?” 

“I thought I was watching him die,” says Richie. “I thought... I thought he’d been killed and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t fucking move, all I could think was that... that he couldn’t be dying because I’d only just found him again.”

“He didn’t die,” she says, gently. “He’s alive, Rich, and I think-”

“He’s married,” he says. He looks up to the stars, coming out of the blue. He wonders what will happen to Derry now, if it will be enveloped by the land or return to dust. 

“I don’t know if that means what you think it means.”

“Uh, no I’m pretty sure I know exactly what it means. It means he’s married. To a woman.” 

“At least tell him how you feel.” 

“Oh hey Eddie, I’ve been in love with you for thirty fucking years. I forgot about it til now, but it’s still... it’s still there, man, and I can’t... I don’t want to forget this time, but you’re married and _ straight _ and I’m gonna fuck off now. How’s that sound, Bev?” 

“Eddie is as straight as a fucking Twizzler, Richie."

"Fucking _ what _? Since when do you have a built in gaydar?"

"Since growing up with you idiots."

Richie snorts with laughter, elbows her clumsily in the side until she laughs too, and presses her forehead to his shoulder. 

“How are you?” he says, quietly, when she’s stopped giggling. “You said you left your husband?” 

“He’s an asshole,” she says, voice muffled by his shirt. “I’m gonna take him for everything he’s got.” 

“Atta girl.” 

They stay outside for awhile longer, sharing another cigarette, talking about things that aren’t so fraught, movies they’ve both liked and bands they’ve seen and books they leave unread on their bedside tables. Bev tries to teach Richie dumb Zippo tricks she learned in college and he fucks them up over and over again, dropping the lighter or burning the edge of his thumb, until she’s crying with laughter. It seems impossible that he could have forgotten her. He’s so tired. The deadlights are behind his eyes, waiting for him to close them, but he’s so fucking tired. He and Bev go back inside and Bev goes to Ben’s room and Richie continues down the corridor to his. He ignores the carousel painting but he can’t ignore the carpet, all shades of red, twists and spirals. It remind him uneasily of the insides of a body. 

When he opens the door to his room, Eddie is there, sitting in the armchair, and he can’t help it, he yelps and stumbles backwards, and Eddie shoots to his feet, hands held out, palm up, expression stricken.

“It’s just... it’s me don’t freak out, Christ, I-”

“How did you even get in here?” Richie demands, stomping back in and shutting the door behind him. He brandishes the key to the room. “I have the key” 

“It was unlocked, Richie, because your sense of fucking personal security is basically zero," snaps Eddie. 

"You think someone with a car like mine doesn't care about their shit?" 

"I think someone who has a car like yours is compensating for something."

"Wow, you come into my home-"

"I'll leave, then, fuck you too." 

“Why are you here?” Richie asks, before Eddie's taken two steps. He stops, stock-still. It’s a hallucination, Richie thinks. Not real. An Eddie-bot. Any moment now the room will fill with balloons and he’ll hear that voice again. _ I know your dirty little secret _. Not dirty, he thinks bitterly. Not little either. And Bev knows and Stan knew so it’s hardly a secret. Checkmate, fucker. 

“I just... I don't know, it doesn’t matter.” He makes as if to leave again, but Richie steps sideways to stop him, hand to his elbow. Eddie freezes as soon as he’s touched and Richie flinches and pulls away and then they stare at one another, half a foot between them. 

“Why are you here?” Richie asks again, voice hoarse. 

“I wanted to explain, I-.” Eddie stops, scowling ferociously, jaw tight. He tries again. “When I left New York to come here, my... my wife threatened to divorce me, she told me she would die if I left, that I was killing her, and... and I came anyway, because I fucking... she’s... you remember my mum? She’s... she’s the same.” He starts to pace, gesturing wildly, wincing whenever the movement pulls at the wound at his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry, what?” Richie can barely breathe. He doesn’t understand a single thing Eddie’s saying. He’s so fucking tired. Eddie’s eyes are... he's so beautiful, even patched up and broken, even tense all through his body like he is, no softness anywhere. Richie thinks he could unwind him. He bites his tongue. He blinks the shadows from his eyes. 

“Listen, I... there’s no love, okay? It’s... mutual desperation, something totally fucked up- she... she needs someone to control and I need- _ I thought _ I needed someone to control me, and I thought it was what I was supposed to do, marry a girl and- and... but then Mike called and I... it was like, I don’t know, I opened my fucking eyes, I guess.” 

“I thought you crashed your car,” says Richie, unable to stop himself. 

Eddie laughs, shrugs helplessly. “Sure,” he says. “That too.” 

“Why are you telling me this?” His torn cuticle hurts. His head hurts. His whole fucking body hurts and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with this information. Eddie is married to a woman he doesn’t love. Eddie is married to someone who treats him like his mother did. Eddie married her because he thought it was something he was supposed to do.

Eddie blinks and then blinks again and he looks small and lost and desperate. He plucks at the sleeve of his hoodie, overlong, grey-white. His red jacket is back in the sewers, with Richie's leather jacket. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought you might... understand that... but I guess I was wrong.”

"No," says Richie, quietly, "you're not wrong, I'm just... processing."

"Right, okay." Eddie's mouth twists. "So should I wait here while you're doing that, or..."

"Hey, fuck you, don't leave." He means to sound flippant, indifferent, but he doesn't. "I'm still not even sure you're real."

“What the fuck does that mean?" 

"Can you stop pacing for two fucking seconds? Just... come sit on the bed, I'm fucking exhausted." He kicks off his slippers, letting them hit the wall by the door and fall to the ground. He should wash the cigarette smell from his hands, he thinks. He should definitely brush his teeth. He does neither, just jumps onto the bed and wriggles back until he's leaning against the headboard.

Eddie follows more slowly, tugging at the cuffs of his sleeves, looking like he's walking to his death. One of his socks says 'Wednesday' across the toes and the other says 'Friday', but it's definitely Thursday. Fuck. That’s fucking cute. Richie’s palms are sweating. It wasn’t that long ago he was bailing on the whole town and on his friends and on Eddie, because of something a clown said to him thirty years ago. No. Because of his own bullshit as well as something a clown said to him thirty years ago. Well. He might still bail on this. He crosses his ankles and then uncrosses them. He takes off his glasses and grinds his knuckles into his eyes and it’s while he’s doing this, while he’s blind and vulnerable, that Eddie sits down next to him. Okay, he thinks, eyes closed, thinking of the way the bed had moved under Eddie’s weight. The deadlights are gone. Eddie is alive. 

“Okay,” he says, putting his glasses back on. Eddie has his legs crossed and his knee is pressed into Richie’s thigh and their shoulders are touching. “Okay.” 

“Okay?” Eddie leans forward so he can peer at Richie’s face. “Are you- what the fuck did you see when... in the lights?”

“Nothing,” says Richie, quietly. “People screaming. Kids. But I heard you call my name too. Did... did you?” 

“I think all I did for hours was scream your name,” says Eddie, looking down. "I thought you were going to die. I've never been so scared in my life."

"You're the one who got fucking.. Impaled. I thought _ you _ were dead."

"The marvels of modern medicine," Eddie hums, looking at his shoulder with a wrinkled nose. "I can hardly feel it, but you..."

"My head is fine, if that's what you're asking," says Richie. "Unless you count wanting you in my bed as a kind of brain damage, which I'm tossing back and forth."

Eddie is quiet for a moment. Richie fidgets. "Is it?" he asks, then, and Richie startles and Eddie grins. "What you want, I mean."

"Yeah," says Richie. "Yeah it is, Eds." There is a feeling at his fingertips like he’s touching something that isn’t there, but he thinks he knows what it is now. It’s Eddie, under his hands. Eddie, at his side. Something he’s imagined for so long he thinks he knows what it might feel like. Still, he’s not brave enough to make it real. He looks at the scrapes on his palms, his ripped cuticle, his bitten nails. 

“You need to look after yourself better,” says Eddie, watching him. 

“So do you,” says Richie, thinking of an inhaler, an orange bottle of white pills, a brown paper prescription bag. Eddie Kaspbrak: unwell. He can feel himself falling asleep, his eyelids heavy behind his glasses, his mouth drooping at the corners. 

“Can I stay here?” Eddie asks, voice barely above a whisper. 

“If you leave, I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Okay, but I have to get my pajamas.”

Richie sits up. “You have pajamas? What kind of adult wears fucking pajamas?” 

Eddie gets off the bed, scowling spectacularly. “What the fuck are you even talking about, everyone wears pyjamas, that’s why they come in adult sizes.” 

“Don’t pretend you’re the size of an adult.” 

“I swear to god, I’m-”

“Go, get out of here, get your pajamas, but if it’s not like... a onesie with little grippy feet like babies have, I’m kicking you out again.” 

Eddie leaves the room, flipping Richie off over his shoulder as he goes, slamming the door. Richie grins and then he wriggles as much nervous energy out of his body as he can and then he slaps at his cheeks and gets up. He brushes his teeth twice and washes his hands three times, not because he expects... anything, but because it’s polite. Smoking is a disgusting habit. Beverly is a terrible fucking influence. He peers at himself in the mirror and he’s pale and his eyes are shadowed and red-rimmed and his hair is still weird, but fuck. They fought a clown demon from space and they won. He really should have aged about forty years. He really should be dead.

He changes into sweatpants and a t-shirt, because he doesn’t own pajamas, because he’s not a child, and then he stares at his bed. He will sleep with Eddie in that bed, he thinks. It has a green, floral, quilted comforter. It has a carved wooden headboard. It looks like something from Little House on the Prairie. 

“This fucking town,” he mutters, and he dives onto the bed and under the covers, wrapping himself up like a burrito, throwing his stupid glasses onto the bedside table. He shuts his eyes and he waits and when the door opens and then closes again he shuts them tighter still. It's the clown, he thinks. It's the deadlights, come to drive him insane and wipe Eddie out of his head again. No. Not that. Never. He opens his eyes and struggles up. Eddie is wearing grey and red plaid pajamas. 

"Say a single word and I'm leaving," he warns, climbing into bed. 

"You look cute," says Richie, voice muffled by the blankets. 

"Stop talking."

"I think you look really cute in your adult pajamas, Eds." 

"Give me some blankets."

Richie does as he's asked and Eddie takes the blankets and wriggles under and then they both lie there, frozen, staring at the ceiling. Richie is holding the edge of the top blanket with a white-knuckled grip. Eddie is rigid beside him, all tension. They're kids again, fumbling and awkward, touching and not-touching. They killed a clown in the sewers and saved each others lives and are sharing a bed, but touching? Too hard. Definitely too hard to ever do, ever. Bev and Ben have probably been fucking for three hours now. Richie starts to laugh, this nervous hiccupy giggle that makes Eddie turn onto his side and stare at him, eyes wide and horrified. Without his glasses, his expression looks so cartoonishly outraged that Richie laughs harder and lets go of his blanket to cover his face with his hands and he can _feel_ Eddie glaring at him, but that's kind of the funniest part, so he laughs until he's crying and it's fucking. Stupid. It's so stupid. Richie's been hiding from himself for so long that all it takes is pajamas and a scowl to break him. Pajamas and a scowl and the end of the world. Baby stuff. Bullshit. 

When his laughter dies, he is exhausted and relieved and uncomfortably happy. He rolls onto his side to grin at Eddie, who isn't scowling anymore, who is watching him with an expression as gentle as water, soft at the edges. 

"You okay?" he asks, voice soft too. 

"Abso-fucking-lutely," says Richie. "You're here. You're... you're real and alive and in my bed in adult pajamas." 

"You need to stop saying that, Richie." 

"Never." He shakes his head. "Never in a million years." 

When Richie was thirteen he fell in love with one of his best friends and never told anyone about it it and then forgot he ever existed at all. That didn't make the rest of it easier. It didn't make kissing a boy at a party at twenty two and then throwing up in the gutter outside any easier. It didn't make standing on stage and joking about jerking off to pretty girls any easier. It didn't make keeping everyone he ever connected with at arms length any easier. It's easy now, to lie in bed with Eddie and memorise the details of his face. His mouth, turned down at the corners, dimples and frown-lines, and his eyes, warm and brown and half-lidded, as they drift toward sleep. It would be easy, he tells himself, to lean forward and kiss him, so he does. He leans forward and presses his lips to Eddie's. A test. A step. And Eddie sighs and smiles under his mouth and his arms slip around Richie's waist so easily and Richie's hands find Eddie's cheek, his jaw, so easily, and there's still a lot to sort out, like what their lives are doing and how they can keep them from ever losing sight of one another again, but for now it's enough just to kiss. In the morning, they will wake up with the sun and they will kiss again and then they'll move forward.

**Author's Note:**

> hello there. so. i saw this movie finally! wasn't it nice? wasn't it just. well. lovely and heartbreaking? i couldn't allow it. so here this is. i hope you like it! it was written for a prompt on tumblr 'tacenda - things not to be mentioned' and it was really only supposed to be a short thing, but oh well. i listened to [come to me by bjork](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ10NHdU11Y) on a loop while writing this so. you should too. [this live version is nice too](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qGutbLI0xk). thank you for reading! [send me a one word prompt on tumblr](https://oneangryshot.tumblr.com/ask) if you like!


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